PinMeTo Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

Introduction hey folks my guest today is daniel melkerson he is the ceo in front of a company called pin me two it's a sas platform that connects multi-location brands with the biggest search map and social media platforms letting them keep their business information up to date everywhere manage reviews and maximize their social reach all from one place daniel you ready to take to the top yeah sure this is great so like if i own a little restaurant in austin texas and i need my google place thing updated and my search results updated and my you know my whatever yelp thing updated i can basically manage my metadata on pin me too yeah exactly so you we we we got one platform to handle all all sorts of listing networks around the world could be a search network could be map services gps services in cars and social media services now when you last came on back in 2019 this was pre-coveted which is sort of interesting i remember you saying i believe you had let's see about 200 customers uh you were selling it for about 800 bucks a month and so you were doing right around a 2 million run rate how did cobit impact you uh we got really scared in march last year but but we what we did then was that actually we we contacted the customers we had in in hospitality industry uh and just said okay let's pause your your payments for the upcoming three months and see what happens with kovid and then after four months everyone was back and paying again so i think that was a good thing that we actually reached out but and we we we've been keeping growing pretty okay uh very very low churn still we're very focused on location-based businesses a lot of them got hurt during covid but on the other hand a lot of the retailers needed our tool to you know say these stories is closed now because of kovid or they want to go out and say hey all these stores in in for example in shanghai needs to be closed now but we open up soon again and and so so it's been good for us and we also switch focus when it comes to the verticals we sell to so we focused a lot on on the verticals that are you know still alive and and kicking during covid so i think we we did good yeah and so how many pain customers do you have today Currently serving 550 customers and what verticals are your top three so we have around 550 paying customers today uh the top three verticals are still retail also ev charging and gas stations uh kind of goes hand in hand today yes it just needs to pivot into eb chartings as well so and so that's the two biggest i guess and then then i would say hospitality still yeah hospitality interesting and are you still is the average customer still paying you about 800 bucks a month yeah around 800 a little bit above 800 i would say 900 today and dig into your pricing a bit for my audience here what's the difference between paying you 200 bucks a month versus 10 000 a month in other words what do you upsell against so we we upsell against the number of locations because they're location-based businesses multi-location businesses for example uh one of the customers work with h m they have stores all around the world so they pay per per store uh so we upsell with the number of locations if they grow by locations and then we cross sell uh with other products on the platform i see okay location-based upselling feature-based upselling that's both great help me understand don't name the customer obviously but what's the your largest customer account what are they paying you per year they're paying us [Music] 300 000 u.s okay that's getting up there and you're probably getting i mean are you generally moving upstream or downstream uh we we're really trying to move upstream and i think we are but we can't all have the same kind of uh average uh deal size the last two years and i think we we're doing really good there so hey if it works there's a model for everyone right so if it's working it's working right and from what i hear you say is you had 200 customers two years ago you have 550 now that sounds like pretty good growth to me yeah i would say not super big enterprises it's our sweet spot but large multi-location businesses yep that's now you shared last time you did not Raised bootstrap this you raised 25k seat around in 2014 you raised i think 580 000 venture around in 2017 and you raised i think 2.3 million series a in 2018 are those correct yes yes can be raised since then or no yes yes the small round with the the investors we already had on board uh almost a year ago now but we haven't used the money yet so that's that's a good thing we kind of did it just because of we could it was a good opportunity yeah so it's an insider round and are we talking like a million or like 10 million no no it's a small it's uh it's uh two to two million about two million okay yeah so then to date you raised total something like five million bucks yeah interesting and and and so were you just nervous about cause obviously you got diluted raising another two million from insiders about a year ago but you're also probably nervous about kobe cash cushion probably feels good why'd you do it yeah we did it because of growth uh to to hire more people open new new offices uh especially sales offices but we we kind of had a good year when it comes to sales so we we we have done what we wanted this year without using the money we we took in the last round but we thought we're really gonna try to use them next year but as long as we can grow with the with the customers money that's that's a great thing you know so you have more than two million cash in the bank today yes that's great so yeah nice cushion you can use it for hiring acquiring whatever you want how many folks on the team today uh almost 80 i think 78 78 wow okay very cool now talk to me a little bit more about what you think like next moves are here right how do you go i'm guessing here if you have 550 Monthly recurring revenue customers at 800 bucks a month you're doing about 5.2 million in terms of run rate right now yeah how do you go from 5.2 up to like you know 10 or 20 million bucks in revenue uh the our the focus we have we are very sales oriented company so very much sales excellence we are opening new hubs uh around the world working very locally when it comes to the culture of the sales people so for example what we're trying to keep the costs down so for example i can give you an example in europe there's very different from country to country the cost of living and the cost of you know having employees and so on so but but in sales you know it's all about you know uh feeling the other person comfortable and that you the person is selling you has the same culture as you and so on so for example we have quite a lot of people born and raised in the uk living in poland today for different reasons and we have them selling to the uk which for us is way way cheaper to have people hired in poland but still they sell in the uk and and the customers in the uk and the leads we talked to they they experienced them as you know a uk office how many how many sales reps do you have then today that have a quota uh around forty thirty-five that's a massive sale they all carry a quota they at 35 carry a quota for sure wow okay so the total sales seems like 40 and then quarter carrying is 35. yeah we that it's we hi what we hired this year was sales people so wow we didn't what's their quota daniel well if i if i joined let's say you hired me this year what would you tell me my first year quota is yeah it depends on what what what market you're you're selling to uh because we always see that the first six months it's it's like just getting getting started make sure you have enough quotes out and then you start closing deals so the first thing six months i wouldn't say you have any quota but you need to have a lot of momentum uh make sure you have a lot of quotes out a lot of meetings and from that on i would say in in us dollars per month around 10 000 that's it for the first year and then you ramp it up so i should be closing 10 000 of new monthly recurring revenue per month as a sales rep uh yeah after a year after a year yeah after a year yeah yeah so if it's 10k a month of new mrr and i do that as a sales rep for you for 12 months i'm basically each sales rep should be adding about 120 000 bucks of new monthly recurring revenue annually yeah now obviously your whole sales team is not ramped up yet because if you did that with 35 people you'd be doing 30 40 50 million bucks in revenue we're not we we were only not even half of those people when we went into 2021 wow yeah so so many of them are still in that six month period where you're still ramping them up exactly yeah very interesting and do you follow toward a sort of standard here in other words ignore the ramp up period once the sales reps fully onboarded are they making you know 200 000 bucks on target earnings if they hit their million dollar quota is that sort of the range yeah it is i would say you're quite right there yeah yeah i mean there's a pretty standard playbook there so i only want to ask more questions if you're deviating from the playbook for any reason no we're boring [Laughter] i don't think you're boring i think you're doing all right you're doing the right thing no no yeah but i think the playbook you're talking about i think that's the one most people should go by it's it's it's a good one and how many engineers are on the team it's uh around 12 12 i think now yeah okay cool we're trying to ramp that up but it's hard it's not what makes it hard it's hard to hire it's not hard to hire developers if you can go whatever but we also want really specialized in what we do that are familiar you know where you used to work with the with the big tech companies and the technologies they use and so on so we're quite picky uh when it comes to the developers we want and we also try to keep them quite close so we we have done a lot of people that actually moved to sweden for a different reason from us from china from all over the world to work close by so we try to keep the team really close and and and maybe this is against what everyone says today we we really like that actually to have the possibility to physically meet up because r d works better that way that's just the way i see things faster not bad maybe not better but faster yeah and talk to me a bit about churn here at this price point what's gross churn what's expansion what's net dollar retention [Music] oh i don't have all the numbers sorry in my head but i we have a gross tone around three percent okay annually or monthly annually on revenue okay yep uh you told me two years ago your expansion was about 20 do you feel like you're doing a better job expanding today than you were then i think we're doing pretty much the same we have a lot more to to do here we have been so focused on you know go get new customers in so we we really this year is the first year we really focused on up sales and cross sales so daniel how do you how does pin penny two fit into like how you think about your personal net worth and your personal well-being like and can you think can you be sort of greedy here are you the sole founder no no we we are three founders uh and a few investors yep so did you guys split the three pounders did you guys split it evenly back in 2014 or 2013 yes oh interesting okay got it so 33 33 33 you've brought on some of these investors um how do you i mean you just raised the 2 million insight around usually that's you're selling like what 10 to 15 percent of the business doing that no well it was actually less oh wow okay oh that's cool that's a big deal that's great i mean that's great anytime you hear something that's not standard i want to understand why so how were you able to get away with raising two million and selling less than ten percent uh all the investors that were already on board was quite happy what they already have and also could see that with the money now we can really really grow and make more value of the the uh the the ownership they already had okay so it wasn't that bad that delusion in that round yeah i mean what i mean was it less than five percent i won't push you harder than that it was pretty much in the middle of five and ten okay got it got it got it yeah so you were raising that i mean that was basically what is that a 28 million dollar pre-money valuation something like that something like that so so so daniel i would argue that's actually a fairly low multiple if you're doing five four million in revenue when you did that deal that's basically 5x multiple but i've seen deals worth i mean these are like 10 20 30 x multiples why didn't you run a formal process and try and get some more competition to focus on the business yeah so this was a quick round that's it get money quick it wasn't a long process yeah yeah and just make everyone happy you know we have really good owners and investors so yes okay let's let's just do this yeah and keep working with the business and it's my math right if you're doing about 440 000 a month today in revenue you were doing about 350 000 exactly a year ago yeah a little bit less actually a little less okay yes i mean this is great this is a good growth story now it's been a year since that last race you know world's coming out of cova do you guys have great momentum are you looking at raising right now no no no i'm not 100 sure we we will do that uh there's a there's so many good other solutions today i know you have one for example and so on for businesses i would love to work we've got 100 million bucks we have to put to work so i would love to work with you yeah so we probably look at that kind of structure instead of maybe racing in you know the usual way yeah i love that i love the alternative approach now what is that approach like in sweden i mean do you have a lot of options or is it hard i mean you probably have government programs and you're insiders what about what's the rest of the ecosystem like there's more and more uh you know solutions for for landing uh i i just this is new it's just started a new company doing this a new fun doing this and people you know been working with the larger banks they got tired of you know they saw the opportunity and started their own funds now yeah so there's more and more of that coming in in in in sweden and and in this part of europe as well after dilution again you raised you know through a series a now i'm gonna maybe guess you still on like 15 to 20 of the company personally so let's say like the reason i'm asking this is a lot of founders at your stage they look at their equity value and they go man i really want to go buy a house or have some kids or start a family but all my net worth is typed in my sas company do you ever have that feeling and what are your options to like potentially diversify i already have the kids i've already done the whole thing i've done the kids i've done the divorce so you're past your life mvp uh i've passed i i've already peaked so everything is a bonus from here not really not really i'm quite happy where i am right now i i have a really good co-ceo now i i can do a lot of things within the company that i love to do where i really see that i put still put a lot of value into the company so no stress at all on the private side if someone like of an investor listening and came and offered each of you three co-founders a million each so three million total for 15 percent but you guys could take it all personally as secondary do you i mean is that something that early stage founders i mean does that get you excited or no i'm not excited but i cannot talk for my other two coffee what about you is that your wife behind you that just walked by no it was actually my son he's just got long hair and oh my gosh sorry about that he has that's a that's like my brother he has like super long hair he like plays guitar in the woods all day he's great all right apologize for that that's that same kind of guy like you have to pop by behind me i love that all right very cool let's wrap up here uh daniel number one what's your favorite business book uh oh uh let's see i'm actually reading scaling up right now it's a good one number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh i always like gary vaynerchuk because he's the way he is yeah number three what's your favorite online tool for scaling pin me too uh i would say plan hat and union both swedish planet what do you use what do you use to manage all your remote employees like to pay them out like payroll taxes all that kind of stuff we're using a swedish company called fort knox interesting yeah yeah it's a swedish company they're all union is a swedish company to do invoices for sas really interesting company if you want to talk to another swedish interesting company i'd love to i want to feature more swedish founders so now i would love that intro that'd be great and then then the other one is plan hat for customer success also really good too so okay number four how many hours of sleep are you getting every night uh between six and eight okay and situation in a married single did you remarry no okay so single so divorce how many kiddos two two kids okay and how old are you daniel i'm 45. 45. last question something you wishing you knew when you were 20. that i did exactly what i did when i was 20 enjoy life you can do other things later on guys there you have it pin me two helps 550 customers like gas stations or ev charging stations restaurants manage their metadata across google search reviews yelp etc they're now charging about they're doing about 800 per month per customer so they're doing about 440 000 a month up from 340 thousand or 320 000 about a year ago so healthy growth uh they just raised another two million dollar and an insider round it caught like a 28 million dollar valuation but very very capital efficient they have less money raised than their total revenue run rate today which we love daniel thanks for taking us to the top thank you one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 p.m central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya

hello everyone my guest today is daniel melkerson he's building a company called pin me too it's a technology designed only for the needs of multi-location brands and organizations to connect and take control over digital brand experience which means boosting brand engagement driving foot traffic and achieving real results daniel you're ready to take us to the top yeah sure all right very good so tell us what the company does and are you pure place ass yes we are pure play sas company and what we do you explained it very very well so we help multi-location businesses could be our focused verticals is retail hotels uh restaurants but it needs to be a chain so it needs to have multiple locations look in locations uh awfully national or globally so what we do is that we help them for if someone searches for them online for example we make sure that they are if you search for a restaurant in los angeles we make sure our customers restaurants concepts in the search results before the their competitors interests our aim and goal with the company and also what we do is that we have a toolkit so and as i said all our customers are multilocation brand so if you're a multi-location brand for example you you if you have a hundred or a thousand locations all over the world then you will have uh customers coming to you online making reviews they try to connect to you and ask questions and they do that for every single location and that is often really really hard for the one especially if you're like a restaurant you have some people running that restaurant and they don't have time or the skills to handle reviews or talk to answer comments on facebook or other social media so we built a tool for i think that's the head office to handle that yeah i think i think that product makes sense to walk me through all people pay so on average what's a brand going to pay you per month to use the technology oh in average uh the average customer is around 800 u.s okay and what does that mean in terms of how many locations are they typically covering oh i always say our median customer has 120 locations but we have customers in between 40 locations up to thousands a couple of thousand locations 40 to a couple thousands yeah okay interesting that makes good sense and then what i mean so are you employing a sales model that is more like an enterprise sale or mid-market or an smb yeah with more more enterprise because a chain is never a small business yeah it's a clean business it's always large too and very good so what year do you launch the company uh we well we launched this the product in the company in the beginning of 2015 but we launched the company in 2013 and i think we got the story that is quite different from others we just had a team where i have developers we were friends so let's start a business and see what we do so so we did quite a dif different things in the beginning but we launched this product uh in the beginning of 2015. okay very good so 2013 and 2015 and how many customers have you scaled to today well about 200 okay 200. and then have you decided to bootstrap the company or did you or did you guys decide to raise we decided to race that's also another thing i i've built companies before uh organically and and this time i just wanted to see how the vc world works so there was a decision from the beginning to raise money yes how much have you raised and we have raised so far about 3.7 million us three seven okay and was most that equity or debt it's only equity it's all equity okay that's good and then i mean can i take 200 customers time i mean you listen so you know i was going to do this right 200 customers times 800 bucks a month you're doing about 160 000 a month right now in revenue yeah and where were you a year ago uh we have doubled since last year so half a little bit more yeah half that where did daniel where'd most that growth come from kind of new customers or driving expansion revenue on historical customers new customers we actually started up sales and or we did some trials with dubsteps last year where we started this this year so absolutely mostly from you customers yes and where are you finding them walk me through kind of your growth channels today uh you mean finding new customers yeah where are you finding new customers oh it's a swedish company as i i think i don't know if you talked about it before but so our our core markets in the scandinavia but we also have an inside sales organization that is built up for sales developers and sales managers and so on and we good where we go out globally in different verticals so it's both from head office with inside sales but also with field sales offices in and all the scandinavian capitals and also in poland thailand interesting wait you said poland thailand yeah so poland scandinavia and thai and thailand yeah interesting okay that sounds like you just wanted to open in thailand so you had an excuse to go to bali every once in a while ah no it's but i i it's opportunity based we knew good people that actually could start it and run it in thailand so what are you i mean field sales is tricky at a 800 per month price point average that's 10 grand a month there's not a lot of margin there to pay the salesperson commission pay for fights etc what's your fully weighted customer acquisition cost on a ten thousand dollar of your account oh wow oh let me see where do i have that uh and probably under cac yeah cac is uh 8 600 okay us okay and that's for a ten thousand dollar a year account uh no yeah it's it's uh it's a it's about that uh it's uh yeah about 10 000. okay so you have about 11 or 12 month payback period yeah 12.9 to be exact right now okay interesting and it sounds like you are now flirting with driving a system to drive expansion revenue on older cohorts so let's dive into that now what is your expense of the customers who signed up exactly one year ago um what did you expand that customer base by or in terms of the revenue they paid uh so far i would say 15 to 20 okay and how much of the revenue from that same core churned over the past 12 months oh we had very little shown it's under three percent per year okay so three percent revenue churn annually 20 expansion will put you at net revenue retention of about 117 percent annually does that sound right yeah that sounds right yeah pretty healthy what's the team look like today how many people uh we're 45 but we were like 25 six to eight months ago so we started the scaling okay very good company so 45 folks and where are most the hires are they sales people engineers customer success uh it's we hired a lot in all of them lately but we are scaling mostly within sales now okay very good and then i assume you're burning capital because of how much you've raised is that right yeah we burned since october last year but 10 months before that we actually were cash positive for 10 months oh great so i mean when you say i had some time to figure things out so when you say burning are we talking like 10 grand a month or 100 grand a month about how much are you burning monthly uh under 100 under 100 okay fair enough so you have i mean what does that give you like more than 18 months of runway yeah when do you think you'd raise again are you are you raising now uh we're not racing now but probably during spring okay and and if you raise in the spring why would that be the right time to raise uh we have good momentum now and also the investors we have on board uh are also want us to scale faster so i think there's also an opportunity in the market for us do you know how much you would target to raise at least uh no i i i don't feel comfortable talking about that already because it's it's a bit we haven't made the decision yeah yeah i think that makes sense i mean if you've already raised 3.7 i mean you've got to be thinking obviously in the millions right three four five million something like that yeah yeah absolutely i don't like to you know when i don't like to say i want to say an exact number since i don't have it but yeah you're within that yeah that's cool very good um okay uh let me see here let's uh let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book oh the latest i read was uh scaling up mastering the rockefeller habits by bernhanisch that's a good one i like that one purple number two is there a ceo you're following or studying not really i follow gary vaynerchuk but that's more like because i like him like his style and his yeah number three what's your funny what's your favorite online tool for building your company oh wow i would say within sales pipedrive uh for customer success plan hat that's the two i work mostly with number four how many hours of sleep to get every night six to eight and what's your situation married single kids married two kids that's good and how are you i'm 43 43 last question daniel what do you wish your 20 year old self knew i would say listen more talk less ask questions guys pin me to helping folks manage better manage individual locations especially big restaurant chains or places with a lot of physical locations over 200 customers today each customer paying more than 800 per month so 160 000 per month right now in revenue that's double year every year from 80 000 a month just a year ago they're burning less than 100 grand per month right now in terms of again net burn they've raised 3.7 million team of 45 people churning three percent of their customer revenue annually but expanding that same court 20 percent so 117 percent net revenue retention with about a 12 month payback period in terms of cac uh divided into again first year ac v daniel thank you for taking us to the top thank you so much thank you